


Inexactly

by maegunnbatt



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Small Town, Angst and Fluff and Smut, Angst with a Happy Ending, Cheating, Childhood Friends, Drinking, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Holidays, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Rey (Star Wars) is a Mess, Sex on a Car, Smoking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-14
Updated: 2019-12-14
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:47:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21796318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maegunnbatt/pseuds/maegunnbatt
Summary: Rey knows him, inexactly.But Ben maybe knows her a little better than that.Modern Small Town AU where Rey and Ben have a history... but that doesn't mean they can't have a future.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Poe Dameron/Rey, Rey & Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 27
Kudos: 246





	Inexactly

**Author's Note:**

> Listen... these two do not exist in a bubble. Their past relationships inform how they are with each other, and they are not perfect people.
> 
> Things are messy, okay? I'm *sorry*.

Rey knows him, inexactly.

Although, maybe a little more than the tangential way everyone knows everyone else in the social circle in which her adoptive mother and his parents perform and spin like plates in their dizzying, dazzling ways. They command a room merely by stepping into it. They set trends and timetables and agendas.

Rey does not have that grace.

Neither does Ben, but he doesn’t have her brilliant excuse of not being born to it.

She finds him at the bar – or maybe he finds her – at someone’s cousin’s wedding or something. Rey isn’t even sure why she is there, except she was invited, and she never turns down free food and an open bar. Student loan debt is real.

Staring down at the dark bar top, Ben, in need of another whiskey, lifts one finger from his lowball glass to signal to the bartender.

“Tedious, isn’t it?” he says once his glass is refilled. His eyes flick to hers before throwing the amber contents down his throat in one fluid motion.

Rey leans on the bar, propping one elbow up on the edge of it while she swirls the dregs of her Tom Collins and surveys the dance floor. It is abysmal, it really is. Rey had been planning to have one more drink, maybe two, and then get the fuck out of that place. _You could meet someone_ , Maz had said. _It will be fun_ , she said. Going to a wedding stag was probably one of the worst idea ever in the history of bad ideas.

“I don’t know,” she says, trying to sound casual. “Could be worse.”

Ben raises an eyebrow to her as he again hails the bartender. “Do enlighten me.”

Rey looks back over the crowd. The DJ has an unironic mullet and an obvious infatuation with early nineties boy bands. Someone has been sick all over one of the round tables near the dance floor. Pieces of greenery have fallen out of the bough along the head table and been kicked around all over the floor. Total disaster.

She raises one shoulder in an ambivalent sort of shrug. “It could be my fucking wedding.”

Even though he is hunching over his glass, Rey sees the smirk that lifts the corner of Ben’s mouth. “Good fucking point.” He turns around from the bar and holds his glass up to her in a toast. “To not your fucking wedding,” he says, and although she knows he’s been drinking all night, he doesn’t slur.

Not that she’d been watching. Much.

Rey lifts her mostly empty glass to his. “And to not _your_ fucking wedding.”

“Hashtag blessed.” Ben’s smirk doesn’t quite reach his eyes. It is the same look she’s seen on him a hundred times. It never quite reaches the rest of his face. With sudden clarity, she realizes that she’s never, in fact, seen him smile. Not since they were kids, anyway.

He catches her staring. His lush lips wrap around the edge of the lowball glass as he takes another sip of his drink. Raising his chin in the direction of the dance floor, he says, “Didn’t see you out there.”

“No,” Rey replies. She doesn’t know quite what to do with her hands, so she wraps them firmly around her drink. Out on the dance floor, her ex is dancing with his new girlfriend, her head tipped back in laughter, his hands firmly on her backside. “Not in the mood for dancing.”

“Mmm,” Ben hums. “What _are_ you in the mood for?”

She glances back up into his eyes. The ambivalence is gone. This is something else entirely. A familiar jolt shoots through her core – she’s seen _this_ look before, too.

Six months ago, she’d run into him at a silent auction charity event. Literally. When she’d rushed into him in a dark, narrow hallway between the kitchen and the dining room, he had gripped her by the elbows and held her still while tracks of tears raced down her face. She had been storming away from her then fiancé. Ben had begun to unwrap his fingers when a stream of waiters came barreling out of the black double doors of the kitchen, carrying dessert trays high above their heads. He had pressed her into the wall as they passed, and she had felt every inch of his body pinning her there. She gasped. The tears stopped. He said nothing, just stared at her while her chest heaved in her black strapless dress, that unreadable expression on his face, those bottomless eyes taking her in, consuming her. When the line of waiters finally ended, he stepped away from her, and in that second, she had bolted for the stairway exit, just around the corner from the kitchen.

And now, at the wedding, in his navy-blue suit, looking at her over his glass of whiskey, his hand trailing a lazy line up and down her upper arm, exposed as it is in her blue evening gown, his eyes have the same look.

 _Oh_.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Rey says, with feeling. She tips what remains of her Tom Collins down her throat.

“You’re in the mood for fuck?” Ben’s eyes dance. “Your grammar is atrocious, even for an engineer.”

Rey plucks his glass from his hands and knocks back the rest of his drink, too.

“Hey!” he protests, albeit weakly.

She sets the glass down on the bar with a heavy clunk. “You wanna get out of here, Solo?”

Ben’s dark eyes look over her appraisingly. “I have a room upstairs.”

Rey nods, gestures faintly at the dance floor with a floppy arm. “Why the hell not.”

He holds out his hand to her, palm up, inviting, and she slips her hand into his and lets him pull her away from the reception, away from the awful music, away from the fresh wound of her failed relationship.

Going stag maybe wasn’t the worst idea, after all. Not that she’d ever tell Maz she was right. Or tell her about this. Or tell her about any of it, at all.

It had been the July between her freshman and sophomore years of college. Ben was home from law school. They were out in the hot sun, working on a service project for one of the non-profits that his mother was somehow connected to. Some reforestation initiative. Rey couldn’t remember, she was doing it for the community service hours, to maintain one of many scholarships.

What she remembered was the way Ben kept pushing his black hair out of his eyes as he bent down to stab the ground with the spade. His job was digging the holes. Her job was setting the spruce trees in the ground. Together, they would kick the soil in around the root ball and tamp it down with their feet. He’d been wearing a black tee shirt that absolutely stuck to him with sweat.

It had been an awkward, unbearably hot afternoon, not a breeze in sight. Two hours in, Rey had taken her water bottle and dumped it over her head. She had pulled the hem of her tank top up to wipe the water out of her eyes, and when she looked back up at Ben – even then, she had to crane to look up at him – his eyes were dark and molten, and he said, “ _Fuck_.” Which was the only thing he said to her the rest of the afternoon.

This memory is fresh in Rey’s mind as she walks carefully across the field at the Skywalker Ranch in the gathering dusk. It is the big fourth of July party that Ben’s family hosts every year. Rey picks up the skirts of her red sun dress, a modest one that goes just past her knees, as she ambles her way to the stables, glad for the pair of broken-in cowboy boots Leia had given her ages ago.

She isn’t expecting to see him, exactly. At least, she isn’t going to allow herself to be disappointed that he isn’t there. This is what she tells herself as she finally makes it to the stable doors, taking a deep breath of the sweet, earthy smell of hay and horses, filling her lungs with it. She’s got a slippery can of Coors Light, pulled fresh from a cooler on the back porch, where Han is holding court with a group of men, bragging to each other with stories of the good old days.

In the back of the stables, under a dusty gray canvas drop cloth, sits the primer gray Camaro that Rey had worked on every summer she was in high school, after she’d cleaned out the stables for a little extra cash. Han had told her if she ever got it running, it could be hers. But she never did manage to get the cranky bitch of an engine to turn over for her. Every time she thought she was close, something else would go bad. So here it still sat. Another failure.

Rey presses the cold can of beer to the back of her neck and flips up the side of the canvas covering the front driver’s side quarter panel. There’s the decade-old dent from Ben’s fist – he’d punched the sheet metal late one evening, startling Rey from where she’d fallen asleep in the backseat, her gloved hands wrapped around a sparkplug she’d been trying to salvage.

“Jesus Christ!” he’d yelled, stumbling back a few steps in surprise when she popped up in the backseat.

“What’s your problem!” she’d demanded, scrambling out of the car, the rusty door hinge groaning unsteadily as she pushed the door open with both feet.

“The hell are you doing here?” He had run a hand through his hair, just long enough at that point to cover his goofy ears, and it all fell back into the same mess.

“Your dad said I could –”

“Oh, my _dad_ said, did he?” Ben had stalked closer to her, stopping just inches from her and leaning down into her face, menacing. “Well, my _dad_ can go _fuck_ himself, huh?” He’d turned on his heel and stalked out of the stables at that, the bitterness of his words hanging in the air, leaving Rey altogether speechless, which was no small feat. She hadn’t seen him after that for years, not until the day they planted spruce trees in the sun.

Rey takes a sip of the cold beer in her hand and flicks the canvas back over the dent. “Hey baby,” she coos softly to the car, giving it a little pat on the hood before rounding the back and hopping up to sit on the trunk. The big stable doors are open on either end, allowing a cross breeze to move over her and the horses. The view from her perch looks east over the fields below, gone to prairie now, and beyond that, the small lake on the property. After sunset, Han, Lando, and Chewie will start setting off fireworks from the fishing dock on the lake, as they did every year. Rey has the best seat in the house — not just the view, but the quietude.

She closes her eyes and falls back to rest against the rear window. She breathes in the scent of the stables and listens to the wind in the grass, the occasional whinny or tail flick, and the insect song around her. She breathes in and breathes out. This is peace.

Footsteps at the other end of the stable break her reverie. She turns around and sees him, silhouetted by the magenta and orange sunset, clutching a beer in one hand, the rest of a six-pack dangling from the other. He pauses, then takes long strides around the car to take up a seat on the trunk next to her.

“Thought I might find you out here,” he says, plunking down the five Coors between them.

She watches him take a long drink, traces the muscled column of his neck with her eyes, taking in the bob of his Adam’s apple when he swallows. The knowledge of what he tastes like right under his ear on the last curve of his jawbone, right where he likes to be kissed – that knowledge coils low in her belly with the heat of a thousand orange suns. It’s been three months, but she hasn’t stopped thinking about it. “Didn’t know you were here.”

Ben smirks in his Ben way and wipes his plush mouth with the back of his hand. “I wasn’t. Just made it back with Lando and enough explosives to level this whole town. Should be a good show.”

“You’re not going to help set them off?”

He leans back on the window, his shoulder barely brushing hers. “Fuck no. That’s how Luke lost his hand. One of many family legacies I opt out of.”

“Oh,” Rey says simply. She takes another drink. “Well, I’m glad you’re here.”

“Yeah?” Ben asks, glancing over at her. He presses his shoulder against hers. “Me, too,” he adds softly.

Rey gives him her own smirk and raises the can to her lips, but isn’t paying attention and tips it too hastily, the beer flowing over her chin and down her neck, running down her chest between her breasts in cold rivulets. She hisses and tries to sit up, but one of Ben’s big hands comes out of nowhere, splaying across her belly, pushing her back against the car.

“Let me,” he says, and then his mouth is on her chest, lapping at the spill, and her knees come up and fall open, a moan escaping her as he licks and kisses and buries his face between her breasts.

“ _Ben_ ,” she says, when she can. His hand moves down her belly and starts rucking up her dress, until his warm hand is sliding up her inner thigh.

His eyes flick up to meet hers. “Is this okay?”

Rey nods and manages to force out actual words. “Yes, Ben, just, I need—”

But Ben’s already doing just exactly what she needs. His calloused hand runs up her inner thigh to the crease of her leg, fingers unhesitant as they dip under the crotch of her cotton panties. He moans as one finger slides slickly through her, and her head falls back against the Camaro with a solid thump.

She’s wet, she knows she is wet, she’s been wet all day, sparking with the anticipation of maybe seeing him again. But even though she knows it, she still gasps when Ben’s mouth finds her nipple through her dress as he tells her.

“Oh baby, you’re so wet.” He turns his hand so the heel of his palm rubs against the apex of her thighs, delicious pressure, and he slides another finger in.

Rey whimpers. Actually _whimpers_ like some kind of inexperienced school girl, and Ben chuckles.

“I love the little noises you make,” he whispers into her chest, teeth tugging on the neckline of her dress, trying to pull it down. “Take this off,” he growls.

Rey’s hands fly to the buttons along the bodice of the dress, undoing them quickly. She isn’t wearing a bra – it is not a necessity – and he moans appreciatively at her naked breasts.

She thrashes back and forth when he pushes harder against her clit.

“I could make a meal of you,” he says as he slides down off the trunk of the car, and she whines, missing his body beside hers for barely a moment, before he is tugging her off the end of the Camaro, tossing her legs over his shoulders as he drops to his knees between her legs.

The second before his head disappears under her skirt, Rey pushes her hands into his soft black hair. She’s obsessed with his fucking hair. He pushes her skirt up over her waist and makes eye contact, pushing her panties to the side. His eyes darken in that way that they do, his breath warm against her quivering cunt, and then his mouth is just there and fucking perfect.

Rey’s eyes snap close with a moan. Her back arches. She presses into his mouth and pulls his head towards her body, trapping him there. He licks and nibbles and sucks. He pushes his fingers inside her, surprisingly deep, brushing against that spot along her front wall, and then she is falling apart on his tongue, babbling, making promises to gods she’s never even heard of.

Ben licks her through it, humming into her center, stroking her thighs as she comes down.

Between pants, she manages to croak out, “Thank you.”

He pulls her underwear off the rest of the way as he rises to his feet. They fly backwards somewhere into the settling twilight outside the stables, and he’s smirking again, the good kind, the kind that reaches his eyes. She’s earned that now.

She sits up, chest sticky and bare, chilling in the cross breeze coming in from the fields. Wrapping her arms around his neck, she pulls him to her.

His mouth is delicious and full. She pulls his bottom lip between her teeth, tasting herself all over him. Their tongues clash furiously. His hand snakes up between them to slide up her neck, thumb on one side of her jaw, fingers on the other, refusing to allow her mouth to close as he plunders her with his tongue. He growls somewhere deep in his chest, his lips and tongue overwhelming her.

It is singularly the hottest fucking kiss of Rey’s life.

Rey’s hands trail down his shoulders and over his abs, pulling up the hem of his plain, dark gray tee shirt until he relents long enough to pull it off. His mouth is back on hers, taking and taking with the same intensity that he was giving and giving between her legs.

She pops open his belt clasp and makes quick work of his fly, one hand steady on the ridge of his obliques, the other reaching down into his boxer briefs and pulling him free. It is a gorgeous, thick cock, long, hard, and weeping. She wraps her fingers around as much of it as she can – the skin so soft – and pulls forward. He hisses into her mouth.

“I need to be inside you, Rey.” He mouths her earlobe, then shifts until he is nipping where her neck meets her shoulder. “Let me in.”

Rey is one step ahead of him, sliding to the edge of the trunk and wrapping her legs around him, lining him up with her entrance.

He slides in on an exhale. Rey sucks in his spent breath as she gasps.

“You feel incredible,” he whispers into her ear as he pulls back out a bit, only to surge forward again with another whisper. “So fucking tight.”

Ben is a purposeful, deliberate lover. When Rey responds to the delicious roll of his hips, he does it again and again, hitting places inside her that she had really begun to think were myths. When she comes the second time, she clenches so hard, Ben hisses and closes his eyes, stilling for a second until she relaxes again.

“Rey,” he whispers, resuming with slow, shallow thrusts. He is looking into her eyes, steady and intense, soft and warm.

His vulnerability in this moment shifts something in her heart, unsettles her. Something breaks. She sinks her teeth into his shoulder. “Fuck me hard and come inside me,” she tells him. “I want to feel you for days.”

He growls, eyes sliding shut as he pounds into her with deep, rough strokes. The Camaro shudders. Rey tells him yes, tells him harder. He complies until his hips stutter and he buries himself deep inside her with a groan, his head buried in her neck. He collapses on top of her, pressing her down against the dirty canvas drop cloth.

She strokes his hair, letting it slide through her fingers like black silk. His sweaty chest is pressed hard against her breasts, almost painfully, and she can feel his heartbeat thundering wildly.

The sun sank unnoticed. Off in the distance, Rey hears the unmistakable sound of a mortar releasing from a tube, and a second later, she sees the bloom of a red star behind Ben’s head. It’s dark enough that Rey can’t see Ben’s expression clearly when he lifts his head to look over his shoulder, and for that, Rey finds herself relieved.

He pulls away from her and slips out gently, pulling up his underwear and pants as a blue shock of light lights up the sky behind him.

Off to the west, Rey can hear the distant “oohs” and “aahs” of the audience set up on lawn chairs and blankets near the house. She buttons up her dress and smooths her skirt.

Ben refastens his belt and climbs up beside her on the trunk of the car. He slides his bare arm under her head and pulls her closer. She rests her head against his well-muscled shoulder and lets her hand fall against his chest, the backs of her fingers softly stroking his skin. A breeze blows through, cooling every patch of sweat on her body.

They watch the fireworks display wordlessly. Ben cracks open another beer and shares it with her. She takes a long drink and hands it back to him.

“I accepted a job in Coruscant,” she says, at length.

“Oh?” He does not turn to look at her.

“Yeah, at Rise Engineering. They’re top-ranked. Award-winning. Etcetera.”

“Why?”

Rey thinks his voice sounds a little tight, so she keeps hers light when she replies. “Thought it would be a good change of pace.” It’s almost the truth, since she doesn’t feel like explaining how moving back to this town was only ever supposed to be temporary, but temporary stretched into months, and the months piled up, or how everything in this town reminds her of how she didn’t ever fit quite right. She is sick of not fitting right. She is sick of things not working. After what is probably too long, she adds, “Do you like living there?”

“Sure beats Chandrila,” he says noncommittally. A cadence of five shots burst into the air, followed by an explosion of red, white, and blue, and applause from the lawn reaches the stables.

It is getting darker, and Ben’s skin is cooling. He sits up to pull on his tee shirt from where he’d tucked it into his back pocket. When he settles back down onto the rear window, he wraps both arms around Rey and pulls her body halfway on to his. “Maybe we’ll see each other,” he whispers into her hair, “in Coruscant.”

“Maybe,” Rey says carefully, pressing her nose into his tee shirt to capture the scent of him.

They fall asleep like that on the back of the car – Rey wrapped in Ben’s strong arms – but when she wakes in the morning, he is gone.

For days, her body keens at the memory of his touch.

She runs into Poe at the gym, of all places. Literally a hundred fucking gyms in Coruscant, and she joined the one frequented by captain dickhead.

She looks like shit, just having come out of a bootcamp class, and she’s looking down at her watch, checking to see how many steps she got in, when their shoulders collide.

“Hey, watch—” Poe begins, then stops. “Rey?”

His face lights up with one of his dazzling, charming fucking smiles – the smile that pulled her in so many years ago, but the tear in her heart only opens a little, and so she thinks this is fine. She can handle this.

“Poe?” She manages to keep her voice steady. “Long time.”

Poe has the audacity to look chagrined, as if he wasn’t the one who fucking kicked her clean out of their life ten months ago, taking their apartment, their friends, their _life_ with him. Because he needed time. Because there was so much he wanted to do yet. Because he didn’t want to settle. She’d spit in his eye and kick him in the balls right now, but that would only prove him right about her.

He rubs the base of his neck with his palm, and Rey takes in the ripple of muscle along his bicep where his shirt sleeve rides up. It looks like he has been working out. A lot. “So you’re in Coruscant again?”

Rey shifts her weight on her feet, cocking her hip out a little so she can rest a fist on it. “Sure am. Took a position with Rise Engineering.”

Poe’s face lights up. “Good for you! They are a really good firm.”

“Thanks,” Rey says, and not because she fucking cares or anything, adds, “Are you still at the same place?”

“Yeah,” Poe says, looking down at his feet. “Hey – do you want to grab a coffee sometime?”

Rey shrugs. “Sure.”

Poe catches her eye. “Tomorrow?”

Rey smiles a little. “I can swing that.”

Poe’s entire face erupts with that smile. “Are you still at the same number?”

Rey nods, smiling wider now, because Poe is just so damn infectious. “Sure am. Text me details,” she says, turning. “I’ve got to run.”

And so that is how Rey ends up getting fucked in a Starbucks bathroom, bent over the sink, leggings pooled around her feet, while Poe kisses her neck and rubs her clit and comes all over her ass.

And the shit of it is, while Rey enjoyed the ride, enjoyed the victory of him wanting her after he’d tossed her aside so recklessly, the second his cock slid into her, it didn’t feel right.

Something didn’t fit.

And it isn’t until she is home in the shower, shaking while she washes his fucking smell off her, that she realizes what is so exactly wrong. She drops her loofah and watches as it all washes away. Watches until the water runs cold.

Days later, she scrolls through her contacts, having finally worked up the courage to call him – and say what, exactly? _Hey, I might be half in love with you and maybe have been my whole goddamn life? Your arms are the safest place I’ve ever been? You feel like home to me?_ – when she realizes that she doesn’t even have Ben fucking Solo’s fucking phone number.

The day Rey’s adoption went through should have been a happy one. She knew this. She knew she was supposed to be grateful, she was supposed to feel wanted, she was supposed to feel lucky. But what that document meant to Rey, more than anything, was that they were never coming back for her.

It meant it was over. They well and truly didn’t want her. They’d given her up.

And while she had understood that for years – she was fifteen, after all, and had been with Maz for almost a decade – the astounding finality of it only made the weight she carried in the pit of her stomach that much heavier.

There was a party the week before school started, and all of Rey’s friends had been there throughout the afternoon and evening but had trickled off and gone home or out to do other things while Rey stayed at the ranch with Maz, surrounded by their little community of do-gooders. Rey loved them, honest-to-Maker she did, but sometimes they were just too much.

Leia and Han and Maz and all the rest sat around the large farmhouse table in the dining room, drinking, telling stories about the good old days. Rey was in the living room, lazily flipping through channels on the big TV. Out of the corner of her eye, she had seen the flare of a lighter on the front porch. It had to be Ben. She crept off the couch and out the front door, careful to not let the screen door slam behind her.

He was sitting in one of the white Adirondack chairs that lined the wide porch, in the dark, just outside of the rectangle of light spilling from the living room window. When he inhaled on his cigarette, a flare of orange illuminated the highlights of his face, leaving the rest in shadow. At nineteen, he was beautiful. Rey had thought so for years, but now she thought other people had to see it, too.

She sat down in the chair next to his, and just like he’d done all summer long, he handed her his pack without a word. She pulled one out and reached for his lighter, their fingers touching lightly in the exchange. She lit her cigarette, painfully aware at how she was still so bad at it, and then handed his lighter back to him. She blew out a steady stream of gray smoke into the night. The air was thick. She wasn’t sure it was just the humidity.

“Congratulations,” he said quietly, without turning to look at her. Their conversations always went like this. Ben talking near Rey, not really to her, and Rey watching his every move, indirectly.

Rey scoffed and rubbed the toe of her sneaker into the wooden planks of the porch, wiping out a bit of ash that had scattered from the end of Ben’s cigarette.

“It’s what you wanted, isn’t it?” he asks, a rankle of suspicion in his voice.

And it was true, in a way. Maz had waited to make things official until Rey was old enough to decide for herself, and so Rey had finally decided, because she did want a family. She wanted to have a people to whom she belonged and who belonged to her, in turn. She just hadn’t expected to feel so abandoned at the end of the process.

But instead of saying all of that, because how could Ben Solo ever know what any of that truly felt like, she said, “You wouldn’t understand. You’ve always had everything.”

It was Ben’s turn to scoff. “You think everything is sunshine and rainbows over here?”

“Your parents love you,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady.

“Maz loves you,” he rebutted.

“It’s not the same.” She deflated in the chair, pulling her body back into the crease of it, drawing her knees to her chest. She took a little puff on the cigarette.

“Listen,” he said, stretching his legs out long in front of him, “those people that you came from? Forget about them. They were _nobody_. They were _garbage_.”

“So what does that say about me?” Rey asked, her voice much smaller than she meant it to be.

“It doesn’t say shit about you,” Ben told her, tone brooking no argument. “You decide who you are. You decide who you are meant to be.” He takes a long drag of his cigarette, the smoke spilling out of his mouth when he starts speaking again. “And fuck anybody who says anything about you. Who the fuck cares what people say?”

“And you don’t care? What people say?” Rey needled.

Ben chuckled darkly. “That’s a game for my parents to play.”

“And what game are you playing?”

Ben glanced over at her briefly. “I could ask you the same thing.”

“I don’t know any games,” she said, pulling her knees tighter to her chest.

“Maybe you just need a teacher,” he replied.

“I don’t need anyone.”

“We’ll see.” Ben stubbed out his cigarette in a potted marigold on the floor by his foot and lit up another one, setting his open pack on the arm of Rey’s chair, an invitation.

During Chandrila’s Labor Day parade, Rey walks with Poe and Poe’s girlfriend – same one as from the wedding, apparently they were serious enough to meet everyone under the Chandrila sun, but not serious enough for him to keep his dick in his pants, interestingly enough – handing out little flags and fun size Crunch bars for the fitters union, which donated heavily to Leia’s last campaign, and of which Poe’s father was a long time officer.

Afterwards, hot and tired, they walk the few blocks from the end of the parade route to Poe’s parents’ house. The girlfriend’s name is Kaydel (“with one ell,” she had giggled, as if Kaydell with two ells was even a thing), and Rey thinks under different circumstances, they might have been friends. She is an easy type of woman, with a natural confidence and not a hint of anger. Her and Poe do things together like sky dive and deep ocean fishing, and Rey thinks clapping sarcastically would probably seem like bad form, so she nods and smiles and says how interesting it all sounds.

Poe and Kaydel with one ell stop at her car to grab a change of clothes, so Rey continues into the house. She’s just inside the back door when she hears his thunderous voice coming from the dining room.

“I said no, and I mean it, mother!”

And then Ben is just there, right in front of her, taking up the whole kitchen, seething mad. He gives her a look that could turn Medusa to stone, then steps quickly around her and out the door.

She follows him out to his car, nearly running to keep up with his long, purposeful strides. When he reaches the drivers side door, he turns to face her. “What?” he roars.

She just stands there. She is not sure what compelled her legs to carry her here after him.

He sighs heavily, shifts his weight, runs a hand through his hair. It’s longer every time she sees him, just touching his collar now. “Rey.”

She goes to him, because that’s what feels right, that’s what fits. She goes to him and she steps into his space. Palms to his chest, she rises up on her tiptoes and pushes a kiss against his lips. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Poe and Kaydel with one ell watching from the front stoop. “Tell me what’s wrong,” she says when she steps back.

He puts his hands on her waist and bends his head down to rest his forehead against hers. “They want me on the Board.”

She’s overheard this conversation, snippets of it, anyway, gleaned from eavesdropping over the past few years. There’s been someone from the family on the Board of Directors in every generation. Leia was retiring, and it was Ben’s turn to take up the mantle. Or so they keep saying. “And you don’t want that?”

Ben sighs again. “It’s complicated.”

“Then explain it to me,” she urges, smoothing her fingertips up and over his shoulders, bringing him closer.

“I’m close to making partner,” he says. It’s something he’s been working hard for, for years. “I can’t afford any… distractions.”

Rey stiffens involuntarily. She wonders, and not for the first time, if that is what she is to him. Just a distraction. “It sounds like your mind is made up.”

Ben pulls away from her, captures her hands in his own and looks down at their interlaced fingers between them. “I need to focus.”

She takes a step back, standing up on the curb. She pulls her hands out of his grasp and lets them fall empty to her sides. “Then focus. Do what you need to do.”

Ben rakes his hand through his hair again. “I’m heading back to Coruscant right now. There’s a trial coming up, and Snoke wants—”

“Go,” she insists, interrupting him. She isn’t concerned with the details. “You need to go.”

He looks at her, cocking his head to one side.

She holds his gaze.

He finally tears his eyes away, opening the driver’s side door between them. “Maybe I’ll see you.”

“Maybe,” she says.

As he drives away, she watches from the curb, wrapping her arms tight around her body. Her heart doesn’t break, exactly.

It’s Halloween when they see each other again at the Organa Foundation’s Annual Masquerade Ball, held at an opulent hotel in downtown Coruscant. They are both dressed in black with simple black satin masks framing their eyes. Leia toasts Poe, who has been named to the Board of Directors in her stead. Kaydel claps politely behind him. When Rey dances with Ben later, she feels the heat of his anger seeping through his black-on-black suit at every point she touches him.

Ben leaves early, glancing over his shoulder at her. She follows several minutes later, finds him at the elevators outside the ballroom. He doesn’t say anything when he takes her hand in his, and still nothing when they step onto the elevator together. He hits the button for the parking ramp. “You’re coming home with me tonight.” It’s not a question.

“Yes,” she says.

He threads the fingers of his free hand into the hair behind her ear. “I’m going to fuck you into my mattress and make you breakfast in the morning.”

They don’t even make it out of the parking garage before he’s coming in her mouth, and she’s coming on his fingers before they even get over the threshold of his penthouse.

In the middle of the night, she untwines his heavy limbs from where he’s wrapped himself around her body in his king-sized bed. She zips herself into her dress and shoves her stockings into her little purse, carrying her shoes in one hand and calling a Lyft in the other as she leaves his apartment.

She’s sick with herself for days, guilt clawing its way through her body.

Rey doesn’t want to go home for Thanksgiving.

She’s on the phone making excuses with Maz, who is at Leia’s house baking pies.

“The car is going to be in the shop for days,” Rey lies, pacing across the floor of her tiny kitchen. “I’ll just stay in the city.”

“And what? Make a TV dinner?” Maz clucks her tongue. “Girl, you are coming home one way or another.”

In the background, Rey hears Leia’s voice saying something, then a shuffle as Maz hands her the phone.

“Sweetheart,” she says, her smoky voice carrying through with the clarity of a bell, “just ride with Ben. He’s coming down early in the morning, just for the day, but at least we’d get to see you. Somebody needs to eat all this pie.”

“I couldn’t ask him to do that,” Rey replies smoothly, pinching the bridge of her nose in irritation. Why must everything be so difficult.

“Nonsense,” Leia says. “He’d do anything for you. Just give him a call.”

“I don’t—” Rey begins, then catches her voice before it cracks. “I don’t have his number.”

There is a long pause on the other end, and Rey can picture the look on Leia’s face as her lips purse and her eyebrows shoot up to her hairline. “You don’t have his number.”

“Nope,” Rey says.

She swears she hears a dish clatter to the floor. Hopefully it wasn’t a whole damn pie. Another rustle, and then Maz’s voice comes over the line.

“I will send you his number,” she says sternly. “And you will call him and you will get in his car and you will be here tomorrow.”

Rey knows when she’s been defeated, as if she ever stood a chance against the older women’s combined efforts. “Fine.”

“Fine, indeed,” Maz says and then hangs up the phone.

The forty-five-minute drive to Chandrila is less weird than Rey expects it to be. Ben tunes the radio to NPR, and they sip their coffees quietly. Rey watches the scenery fly by outside the window, the frost tipping the buildings and trees along the road reflecting the glint of the early morning sun. She closes her eyes and rests her forehead against the passenger side window, soaking up the sun’s warmth.

After a while, Ben reaches over and puts his hand on her knee. She puts her hand on top of his, curling her fingers around the edge of his palm, only allowing him to remove it when he downshifts to exit the highway.

They pull into the circle drive at the ranch a little after eight in the morning. Ben opens her door for her, then pulls a case of wine out of the backseat. He puffs out a heavy breath that hangs in the air between them. He’s looking down into her eyes with that deep, bare look he gets when he’s searching her. “You ready for this?” he asks.

“Are you?” she retorts, lifting her bag onto her shoulder and closing the car door. The ground is brittle from a particularly bitter snap of cold weather, and they crunch along the path up to the kitchen door.

Inside is quiet and still. The TV is on in the living room, tuned to the pre-parade broadcast, and the coffee pot gurgles in the death throes that signal the end of the brewing cycle. It smells divinely of warmth and love and all that is home to Rey. She’s probably spent more time in this kitchen than anywhere else on the planet.

Leia barrels in from the dining room, a box of matches in her hand. “Oh good, you’re here. And you’ve brought wine.”

Ben leans down and accepts a kiss on the cheek from his mother before she turns to Rey. “And it’s good to see you two together. Finally.”

Leia pulls her in for a hug, and Rey’s eyebrows knit together when she looks up at Ben.

Ben shrugs and shakes his head a little, as if to say he doesn’t know what she’s talking about either. 

Leia pulls back from Rey, matches still in hand, and starts opening drawers in the kitchen. “Ben, come help me with the fireplace,” she says, withdrawing a culinary torch from Lord knows where. “Your father’s still in bed, and you know how little patience I have.”

Ben nods and follows her out of the room, leaving Rey alone in the big kitchen. She can make out the shape of the conversation mother and son are having in the next room, catching words like “best behavior” and “supportive” and “he’s family.” They’re talking about Poe and Kaydel’s engagement, announced just a week ago, but which will be part of the celebration today.

Rey has the sudden and curious itch to walk in there and tell them about the coffee shop and the night he came over to her apartment just two weeks ago, how he’d told her she would always be special to him, even though Kaydel was the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. How she probably deserves better than him, and how she definitely deserves better than _Ben_ , his tone dripping with hatred at the drop of his name. “You know _exactly_ what he is, Rey.” That time, she didn’t even feel bad for herself, she just felt bad for him. She’d shut the door in his face.

Poe Dameron, turns out, is just a fuckboy with an inflated sense of importance, and she is pretty sure he knows it. But at least he wasn’t her problem anymore.

“Let him live his life,” she says to herself, barely a whisper, steeling herself against the urge to expose him.

“What was that?” Ben says softly, stepping back into the room.

“N-nothing,” Rey stutters, caught eavesdropping.

Ben looks down at her, dark eyes dancing back and forth between her own, assessing. “You said let him live his life.”

Rey shrugs. “If you heard what I said, why did you bother to ask?”

“Tell me what’s going on, Rey,” he commands.

Something twists and lets go inside her. It’s impossible to hide. “Later,” she whispers into his chest as she leans against him.

Maz crashes through the back door, Chewie on her heels, both of them laughing, bottles of liquor in their arms. Rey and Ben spring apart like guilty teenagers. The rest of the morning is spent preparing food, the kitchen a hive of activity. Ben’s fingers find her hips every time he brushes past her, and she trails a hand along his forearm when he passes her a wooden spoon.

At some point, Poe and Kaydel show up, his parents in tow, and then Lando is there, and Luke saunters through, smoking a joint, and Han starts collecting people to sit in the living room to play poker and drink whiskey with him.

Leia and Rey pull the turkey out of the oven around one o’clock. It is perfectly brown and smells amazing. Maz starts making gravy, and Rey excavates the stuffing out of the cavity and throws it back into the oven to crisp up a little before serving. Leia is arranging the twenty-pound turkey on the serving platter and her eyes catch Rey’s.

“Listen, Rey,” she says in that tone she has, the one she uses to command a room, even if it’s just the three of them in the kitchen, “Ben is my son, and I love him, but so help me Maker, if he harms a hair on your head, I will bury him where they will never find the body.”

Rey swallows and looks from Maz to Leia, panic unfurling in the pit of her stomach. She presses her hands against the edge of the counter to stop them from shaking. She thinks of all the things she could and maybe should say, how they aren’t together, how his ex had dropped those charges years ago, how she’d talked to Bazine at some point after the whole ordeal and she’d told her how she had twisted things just enough, enough to really hurt him, how Ben isn’t that person and never was. Angry, yes. Cruel, no. What she says instead, with pronounced certainty is, “He will never hurt me.” In her brain she adds, _I won’t let him_.

Leia pats her hand and then leads the procession out of the kitchen, carrying the too-big turkey in front of her like an offering.

After the toasts are made to Poe and Kaydel’s unending happiness and after the dinner plates are cleared, Rey sneaks up the back stairs to the front bedroom on the second floor, Ben’s old room. His posters have been taken down, but the walls are still dark blue and all the furniture is the same. His bed, his dresser, his desk. She sits on the edge of the bed, smoothing the dark gray and navy comforter on either side of her thighs. She looks out the windows across the yard to the stables. He could have watched her working out there, every summer, either with the horses or the Camaro.

She senses Ben in the doorway before she hears him. She doesn’t bother to turn when he enters and closes the door behind him, the click of the lock loud in the quiet upstairs. The mattress dips behind her, and he wraps his body around hers, drawing her back against his chest. He brushes her hair away from the right side of her face and presses a kiss on her neck, just at the spot where her shoulder meets.

“Is it later yet?” he whispers.

Rey closes her eyes and leans into him further. “I had sex with Poe,” she whispers.

He stills. “Well, obviously. You were together for years.”

“No,” she says, swallowing thickly. This is hard. “After I moved back to Coruscant. Last summer.”

He pulls away from her.

A tear falls down her cheek, unbidden. “And he came to my apartment a few weeks ago.”

“ _Rey_.” It comes out a whisper on his breath, dripping with disappointment.

“I didn’t let him in,” she tries to explain. “I don’t even know what he meant by it.”

“Oh, I think you do,” he says, his tone dark, malevolent. “That son of a bitch.”

“It’s complicated,” she says. More tears escape.

“ _Then explain it to me_ ,” he says quietly, echoing her words from months ago.

“There’s… _history_.”

“And we don’t have _history_?”

“ _Ben_.”

“ _Rey_ ,” he mimics.

“Don’t make this hard,” she says, turning to face him. He is pushed back against the headboard, arms crossed over his chest, one leg off the side of the bed as if readying to leave.

He glares at her. “You think I should make this easy? Whatever _this_ is?”

“We never said—it’s not like –” She considers what to say, carefully. “We’re not together.”

“So all this time, you’ve been, what? Seeing other people? _Fucking_ other people?”

“Haven’t you?” she argues.

He shakes his head. “Just you, Rey.”

Rey lets out a frustrated sigh. “I didn’t even have your phone number until yesterday.”

“Well, that explains why you never called.”

“But it doesn’t explain why _you_ never did.”

They hold each other’s glares.

“What do you want Rey?” His tone is not gentle.

She looks at him, takes in his dark hair falling forward into his eyes, the muscles of his forearms tense where they’re exposed below the rolled-up sleeves of his black button down, the downward curves at the corners of his mouth. He is exceptionally unhappy in this moment, and she aches with the realization that she has let him down. She isn’t sure what the rules were, exactly, and now she isn’t sure she’s going to be able to make it right.

“I don’t know,” she says at last, because that, at least, is a truth she understands.

He slumps against the headboard, head cocking to one side, frowning even deeper now. He pushes up off the bed and covers the distance to the door in two steps. “Call me when you figure it out. You have my number now.”

He throws open the door and stomps down the hallway, down the steps. She hears him say something to his mother about needing to get back early, and then Rey hears his car start up and the crunch of tires on gravel.

She curls up into a ball on Ben’s bed. A little while later, Maz comes upstairs and rubs her back. She leaves a glass and a bottle of Ben’s wine on the nightstand, and next to it, a whole pumpkin pie.

The next day, Han drives her back to the city. He doesn’t say a word about his son. Turns out, he’s quite the whistler.

When they pull up to her apartment building, he simply says, “See you around, kid.”

She doesn’t call.

Not the first week. Not the second week, nor the third.

Ben stops checking for messages and missed calls. One night, after too much whiskey, or maybe not enough, his thumb hovers over the button to delete her contact info from his phone – _she didn’t even have his number_ – but instead throws it across the room with a frustrated growl.

Because the truth is, he would do anything for her. He would _still_ do anything for her. He just needs her to tell him what that is.

Snow falls on Coruscant the twentieth of December. He’s having dinner with another junior partner at an upscale restaurant, and he sees Poe and Kaydel sharing a dessert by candlelight, and something inside him just snaps. His fist collides with Poe’s face one minute, and the next, Hux is hauling him out of the restaurant into the cold night. Outside, he shakes Hux’s hands off of him and rubs his sore fist into the open palm of his other hand.

“Fucking hell, Solo,” Hux says, pushing Ben toward the valet stand. “What the hell was that about?”

“Just some asshole from back home,” Ben grits out between clenched teeth.

“If Snoke finds out about this—”

“But he won’t will he?” Ben laces his tone with enough malice that his intention could not be more clear.

Hux shuts his mouth and nods. “Depends on what it’s worth to you, Solo.”

Ben chuckles. _Fucking Hux._ “Name your price.”

Thoughtfully, Hux raises an eyebrow. “A thousand dollars.”

“Will you take a check?” Ben smirks.

“Fuck you, Solo,” Hux says as the valet returns with his Audi. “I should have asked for five.”

In the car, his knuckles start to purple. It’s been a long time since he’s punched someone, and he’d almost forgotten what it felt like to hurt in his bones like this. He’ll need to ice it when he gets home, but first, he sends a quick text to his mother.

_Not making it home for Christmas. Apologies, etc._

He sends her straight to voicemail when she calls him back.

He sends her straight to voicemail for six straight days.

On the seventh, Ben stumbles to his front door to answer the furious knocking that has risen him from bed. He is not expecting company, and so it must be an emergency of some sort for the doorman to let whoever this is up to his floor. He’s in boxer shorts. Just boxer shorts. He hasn’t shaved in a few days, having locked himself in his apartment while a little blizzard made its way through Coruscant, and he is sure he looks a wreck. Matches how he feels at least.

He wrenches open the door, fully intending to yell at whoever is on the other side, but he stops short when he sees her.

She’s obviously been crying. She has a shopping bag full of wrapped presents in her hand and snowflakes in her hair.

“What are you doing here?” he asks her, because he wants to know. Needs to know.

Rey looks up at him with wet eyes, and says, lamely, “I brought your presents.”

Ben steps forward and takes the bag out of her hand and sets it down just inside the door, next to the umbrella stand that he never uses. Then he leans against the doorframe, blocking her admission, and crosses his arms over his chest. “Is that it?”

Rey licks her lips, eyes cast to the floor, probably looking at his naked feet. They are hairy and bony and remarkably unattractive. “Can I come in?”

Ben considers for a moment, then relents, pushing off the door frame and standing aside so she can come through the door. He thinks back on the last time she was in his apartment. They’d barely made it to the bed, and then she’d run out on him in the middle of the night. This time, she turns a tiny circle in the entryway. He holds out his hand and she shrugs off her coat. He hangs it on the hook next to his own, then motions with an arm into the living room.

She sits on the edge of his black leather sofa, knee bouncing, nervous.

“Why are you here, Rey?” he asks again, sitting down in a leather armchair across from her. “What do you want?” _Just tell me what the fuck you want._

She slides back into the sofa, eyes rising to meet his. There’s a determination there, and Ben thinks, _there she is_.

“See, that’s an interesting question, isn’t it?” Rey begins. “Because there are several things you want to know when you ask that one question, which should be super simple, except it isn’t. What do I _want_?” She repeats, taking a pause for effect or to collect her thoughts, he’s not sure. She’s nervous. Rambling. Wringing her hands.

She gestures out the large windows overlooking the city. “I _want_ it to stop snowing, for starters. I never liked the goddamn cold.”

Ben can’t help but smirk. Even as kids, he could never get Rey to play in the snow.

“I _want_ to always remember the bruised half of Poe Dameron’s precious face when he sat down at the dinner table and refused to tell anyone what happened.” She eyes him suspiciously.

He ducks his head and runs his bruised hand through his hair.

“Yeah, I thought that was you,” she says, without malice.

He puts his elbows on his knees and leans forward, lacing his fingers together, only wincing a little at the receding pain in his hand.

“And I _want_ ,” she pauses, leaning forward on the sofa to wrap her tiny cold hands around his, “to wake up in your bed tomorrow and then have breakfast together. If you’ll let me.”

“And the day after that?” he asks, because he needs to know. He needs to know that she’s going to be there, that she isn’t just going to disappear on him again.

She slides off the edge of the sofa and drops down to her knees in front of him. “That depends,” she says, a wicked gleam in her eye.

“On?”

“Are you going to tell me what you did to my Camaro?” Her hands slide up his forearms.

Ben grins then, a true, real grin. “It literally took you ten years to figure that out?”

“Was it the fuel line?” She rises up to her knees and presses a kiss to his forehead.

Ben shakes his head. “Too easy. You’d have figured that out in a heartbeat.”

“Carburetor?” She kisses the tip of his nose.

“I’ll never tell.” He grins.

“If you won’t tell me what you did, at least tell me why you did it.” She shifts forward on her knees, planting herself between his thighs. He sits back in the chair and runs both hands over her snow-wet hair. She smells like winter.

“I watched you,” he says. “Every summer, out there in the stables. And I wanted to keep watching you. I _wanted_ to keep _you_.”

She leans forward and whispers against his lips. “And do you still want to keep me?”

“Trick question,” Ben says, licking her lips with a quick flash of his tongue. “You will never consent to be _kept_. You don’t _want_ to be _kept_. You want to _belong_. You don’t want to be _desired_. You want to be _necessary_.”

She looks up at him, her hazel eyes gone wide. A single tear slips off her lower lashes. He catches it with a thumb. Of course he is right. He knows in his bones that there’s something about Rey that he’s always had _exactly_ right.

“And you _are_ necessary, Rey,” he continues, pressing his thumb to his lips and tasting her tear. “I’d set this entire fucking world on fire for you, if that’s what it took to prove it.”

Rey smiles a little, taking a gulp of air. Her voice is choked with sobs. “That’s a fucking good answer, Solo,” she says, pressing her mouth to his.

The best time for Ben was not the Masquerade Ball, when he’d made her scream for him before falling asleep with her in his arms. The best time wasn’t even the Fourth of July, fucking her against the Camaro in the fulfillment of his teenage fantasies. The best wasn’t even the wedding, when she’d followed him up to his room and shattered his world. The best time, for Ben, would always be the first time.

He was fresh out of law school, and she was moving to Coruscant to pursue her master’s degree. As a favor to his mother, or so he told himself, he had helped her move in to her small apartment near campus. It was an absolute dump, and he spent most of the day teasing her. But dammit if that girl couldn’t carry her end of a couch up three flights of stairs. She paid him in pizza and beer, and once they got everything moved in, they watched a baseball game on her beat-up TV. She rooted for the home team, and he rooted for the away. For a few hours, Ben forgot about everything outside the 492 square feet of Rey’s apartment.

When he was saying goodbye, Rey had wrapped her arms around him, whispering thanks in his ear, then pressing a kiss to his cheek. The kiss lingered, and Ben turned his head to meet her lips with his own. He swept her up into a bridal carry, her laughter echoing in the mostly empty apartment when he carried her down the hall.

It had been tender and gentle, intimate in a way Ben had never been with anyone, not even Bazine, to whom he thought he probably ought to get around to proposing.

On the bare mattress of her unmade bed, after fumbling with the condom, his nervous hands shaking, on that first sweet, slick slide into her, he’d made her gasp and tremble and moan. She’d wrapped her legs around his body and whispered encouragements and appreciation. Even though they weren’t kids anymore, they were still so young. Everything felt possible. He had never felt so connected to another human being, and he knew somehow he never would again.

Afterwards, he felt guilt for not feeling guilty. For hours, he had watched the shadows creep across the ceiling, deciding what he should do next, while Rey slept next to him, her limbs reaching for him in the dark. The obvious answer, of course, should have been to put his fucking clothes on and go home to Bazine. What he did instead was curl his body around Rey and whisper into her ear how much he loved her. She had hummed in her sleep and pressed her body against his.

But it wasn’t love. Not exactly. Love was too small for the way she made him feel.

In the morning, she seemed surprised that he was still there. They ate cereal in the kitchen, standing up at the counter. Finally, she asked, “I guess you probably need to go, huh?”

And he did, and so he put on his shoes. Before he left, he impulsively pulled her into a fierce kiss, trying to put all of his longing and regret into it. She licked her lips and held her eyes closed for a few heartbeats after it ended, and Ben had cradled her chin in his hands.

“If you ever need anything,” he told her, one hundred percent earnest, “all you need to do is ask. I left my number on the fridge.”

The next few months of his life had been complete and utter chaos, the fight with Bazine, the cops and the lawyers. He had always hoped Rey would call, but he supposed after all of that, she couldn’t. The next time he’d seen her, it had been Christmas, and she was on Poe’s arm, and she looked happy.

For years, that night had echoed in his head, and when he’d seen her again that night at the wedding… it all snapped into focus. In that moment, he knew what he needed, what he’d needed for all of those years. Just her.

On the twenty-eighth of December, Ben wakes up to the smell of bacon and burnt toast.

He stretches in bed and runs a hand over the stubble on his chin. He can still taste her, and her smell is everywhere – in his nose, in his sheets, in his hair. He pulls on a pair of clean boxers and pads out into the kitchen to find her.

She’s humming, swaying slightly back and forth in front of the stove, surveying the progress of a pan of bacon and some scrambled eggs, spatula raised like a weapon halfway over her head. And she is wearing one of his tee shirts. It’s way too big on her – hanging off her shoulder, sleeves down past her elbows, hem hitting mid-thigh – but it twists something in Ben’s chest. Her in his kitchen. Her in his clothes. Like she belongs there, because she does.

He walks up behind her, wraps his arms around her waist and rests his chin on her shoulder. “You’re about thirty seconds away from burning the bacon,” he tells her with a kiss to her temple.

Rey leans her head against his shoulder. “I like it a little dark.”

“Yeah, you do,” he teases, nipping at her neck before she swats him away with her non-spatula hand.

“Ben Solo, I am scandalized!” she says mockingly.

He pulls the orange juice out of the fridge and says over his shoulder, “You didn’t seem too scandalized last night when you were sitting on my face.”

“Shocking!” A kitchen towel hits him in the back of the head, and he chuckles at her as he pulls two glasses out of the cupboard.

He sets the orange juice glasses down on the granite island, pulling a stool out for her as she brings two full plates around the island. “Sorry I burned the fuck out of the toast,” she says, not sounding sorry at all. “Your toaster is _sensitive_.”

His elbow is up on the countertop and he props his chin in his hand as he smiles down at her.

She’s already shoved a forkful of eggs in her mouth. With her mouth full, she says, “What?”

Ben shakes his head a little. “I could get used to this.”

Rey swallows and laughs. “Me insulting your kitchen appliances?”

“No,” Ben says, shaking his head again. He keeps watching her, anxious for all the flickers of emotions that race across her face. “You in the daylight. You in my kitchen. You in my tee shirt. You in my bed.” _You in my life._

Embarrassment flashes across her eyes, and she looks down at her plate.

He tilts her chin up with one finger to catch her eyes again. “ _Stay_.”

A slow smile spreads on her face as her eyes dart back and forth between his. She is happy. She nods. “Are you going to make me carry my couch up the stairs again?”

He smirks. “That whole ‘burning down the world for you’ thing? I’m starting with that couch.”

Rey smirks back at him, dips her chin and nips his finger before he can pull it away. “We’ll see.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading.
> 
> Comments are love.


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